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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my truth and what it means to live my truth and be authentic. In today’s society, we have a tendency of living on the surface level of our selves. We live in filters, on labels and titles and constantly look outside of ourselves to fulfill our souls. Social media and MSM dictate and try to steer us onto a particular path that may be stylish or hip but it may not speak to our authenticity. We believe that the number of friends or followers gives us our rating as a human being.

There are some surface level perks to living in that state, such as we gain more friends and followers, we are in the know of whats trending and people look up to you as a gauge of whats cool. We are constantly given praise and validation and we may even climb the corporate ladder of success. Money rolls in and with that we gain more luxuries. BUT… it comes as a price. We have created a space that ticks all the boxes except for the main one, which is our soul. We have become lonely in a crowded room of filtered faces that we don’t actually connect with. We become lost in the maze that we created and start asking ourselves, why am I lost? Why am I lonely? I have everything, what’s missing?

When you start asking those questions, it’ probably because you are living on a surface level and away from your values and your authentic self. You have replaced meaningful relationships with thumbs ups and hearts and you’ve compromised your authenticity and your integrity.

But it’s not all bleak, for the sake of sounding too depressing and cynical, you can change this! You can live in a real state of authenticity and enjoy the fruits of this beautiful life.

If you want to live more authentically, these 3 tips will help:

Nurture An Open Mind

Being stuck in tunnel view thinking whether it’s good or bad, can limit our experiences and growth and can stop us from being vulnerable. Vulnerability is a good thing!

Redefine Your Values

Write down your values and redefine them. As we grow in this life, our values can change so it’s always good to check in with them.

Visualize It

Create a vision board digitally or DIY up on your wall. Find quotes, images or words that describe your ideal authentic life and put in a place that you will look at it all the time so you don’t lose sight.

When you are living authentically, the benefits are:

Having a profound sense of happiness – not based on others or possessions

Making decisions become easier – you are not conflicted with what social media says

You live your truth – you no longer have to hide parts of yourself

Your family, close relationships enjoy the real you – they show you love, acceptance and appreciate for the real you.

Your life has less clutter – you can weed out what doesn’t compliment your values and what stops you from being authentic

Successes are more fulfilling – your triumphs come from not compromising your values or who you are therefore they have more fulfilment. You made it by being the awesome person YOU ARE

You become more self-aware – you are tuning in to your truth and can step back and stop yourself from moving away from your authenticity

You have peace of mind – the internal battle that can keep you awake at night becomes quiet as you know who you are.

Making the decision to live authentically can be scary and uncomfortable. It means that you have to sacrifice any relationships or lifestyle that does not align with your truth and this isn’t a walk in the park. Be prepared to feel uncomfortable but also be prepared for greatness and beauty and the feeling of freedom.

You will be walking in your own integrity and in your own truth and life will greet you with kindness as you show the world who you really are – right down from your thoughts, to words and to actions.

Living the best version of YOU is really the only way to be… and at the end of the day, no one can do a better job at that than you.

Hey Beautifuls!
Lately, my partner and I have been watching a lot of Tony Robbins. You may have heard of him, he’s a life coach, business/relationship expert and all round awesome guy with a lot of knowledge to share.

Yesterday, I was watching some clips on YouTube and one thing (of many) that stood out for me was this message: Stay in your head – your dead – now I know he doesn’t mean this literally but there is some truth to this.

Staying in our head is like a room for our fears and insecurities to put on plays for us. They make up scripts, stories and scenarios for us to watch and feast on and it can detach us from reality around us and create more anxiety and more fears of things that don’t exist. Even more so, it can focus in and highlight the negative parts of our partners or people that are close to us and completely wipe out the positives. We all have a dark side and a light side, and staying in your head at a time when you are vulnerable and going through conflicts/problems can highlight only the dark side in the person or people you are conflicting with and that puts you in a position of attack and react – rather then openness and willingness to understand.

Staying in your head means you aren’t present. You may be in the company of your partner, work colleagues or friends but you really aren’t there; you’re there with a cloud over your mind. You may be watching replays of past experiences that were painful or shameful and I tend to believe that the more we let our mind replay them, over time the replay can change and shifts from what the reality actually was (for some experiences). When we stay in our head watching replays, it affects our present in how we behave, feel and see things.

It can sometimes distort our perceptions of people we love because we assign a replay of our past to their existence even when they weren’t part it.

Staying in your head can stop you from growing and changing. Right now as you are, you have strength, confidence and love to bring to yourself and others. You CAN GROW. You CAN CHANGE. What can stop us in our tracks is staying in our head. When we do this and don’t come up for air, we give permission for our fears, doubts, insecurities and pain to rewrite the bad stories, replay the scene over and over and when we come back to reality, we don’t believe in ourselves anymore. We say things like “I can’t do this, look at what I did! I’m a loser” “There’s not point, I tried quitting before and fucked up, I’m just not that person” “She/He’s too good for me, they can’t know my past” There starts to be a whole lot of no’s and cant’s which can stop you from giving love, receiving love and accepting the beautiful moments that appear. It stop you from bettering yourself because your head tells you, you can’t.

You can quit bad habits, you can achieve happiness and that person adores you – you deserve that love and he/she deserves love from you.

So this is my little rant on what I thought of when I heard that “stay in your head – your dead” quote.

Of course there is a need for reflection and analysis of yourself, situations and people to determine what is right for you, but don’t get comfortable in your head and allow the fear, pain and shame to be put on replay.

Stay present, stay mindful and stay open to love, challenges and to your relationships.

Please leave a comment if this speaks to you or if you have a perspective on this or an idea 🙂 I’d love to hear from you.

As you start this week, start it with passion and drive! Know where your goal is and work towards it. Every successful person, every expert, was once where you are now; at the beginning. They were on the ground, learning from trial and error, learning from elders, from peers and from experts.

Remember that every step counts as long as you start and especially maintain momentum and consistency.

There is always a beginning for everything. If this week you are determined to start your goal and then follow your intention with action, you are already closer to your goal than you were last week.

I personally think it’s about the people who show up, be present and really take ownership of and are committed to raising, supporting and showing unconditional love to that child. Also, a real parent is someone who struggles, who makes a mistake or who breaks down but get’s up and moves forward in love, strength and forgiveness.

Real parents are not squeaky clean or always having their shit together and have perfect homes with children who don’t kick and scream.

A perfect parent does not exist in this reality and we should stop striving to reach that perfectionism. Instead, we should stay present in our own family unit and try to be the best parent we can each day.

Don’t feel guilty if this week you can’t buy that toy your daughter’s been going on about all week. Don’t feel bad if, at the end of a long crazy day, you put your kids in front of the TV so you can have some time to yourself. Don’t get down on yourself if you can’t cook a home-made, natural, organic feast every night and some nights your kids might have Baked Beans on toast.

Be content in yourself that your daughter has all she needs and be positive that one day you will surprise her with that toy and she will love it! Also, when you put that TV on, remind yourself that you deserve a moment’s peace while the kid’s zone out because you need it. You need to be okay with yourself so you can keep being an awesome parent and if that means having some chill time, then let it be. Lastly, Be bloody proud of yourself that you managed to be resourceful so that your children don’t have to go hungry because you got it sorted! 😀 And baked beans on toast isn’t going to kill them 😉

A real parent smiles, laughs, yells, cries and cheers. A real parent is someone that accepts that they don’t have all the answers but every day they are there, doing the best damn job as a parent that they can be.

This is a bit of rant so apologies if it sounds a bit all over the shop. It’s just something that I feel compelled to write about today.

Life can feel light as a feather or as heavy as a boulder. It can change in an instant or it can feel like a song on repeat. We can’t control how this game unfolds and our roles we play can vary and transform. There are a lot of things that are out of our control but we can always control how we think about them. Please don’t confuse this with how we feel about them; feelings are something that happens without logical thought, it’s an emotion and we can’t choose our emotions but we can choose how we think about a situation.

I often get told that I’m a positive person and I’m always happy. This is nice to hear and on one hand, it is true. I am generally a positive person but I’m not always happy, I just choose to show more of my happy self then my other emotions like stress, pain, discomfort or sadness. It’s not possible to always be happy, and if you are always happy, how can you tell if you never experienced pain? You need both to distinguish the light from the dark and to understand it.

I believe we should encourage each other to be positive, to choose positivity and instead of choosing to just be happy regardless of what is happening. The more we say to others “oh just choose happiness” “if you want to be happy, then just be” it can sound like those other emotions aren’t important or if you can’t choose to be happy right now, that there must be something wrong with you. It doesn’t validate that person who may be struggling with depression or who may have gone through trauma. We must be careful with how we say to others to just be happy when we don’t know what is happening in their world.

Choosing to be positive is about allowing yourself to feel sadness or pain and giving those emotions time to just be without it affecting your mind in a negative way which in turn could mean destructive behaviours and poor choices. You can feel sad, and use logical thinking to look at the situation and try your best to make the most out of it and see what you can learn from it. It’s about seeking out the good, the light in a situation or person. Choosing to be positive is allowing your heart to feel and your mind to help you decide on how to move forward or how to be present in a way that’s helpful to your mind, body and spirit.

We often confuse positivity with happiness. Happiness is an emotion that we are born with and positivity is a learned behaviour, a mindset that takes practice and mindfulness to achieve. Learning to think positively, can bring more happiness to your world but happiness can’t always bring positivity to your world. This is because happy feelings can come from things that are fleeting, one-offs or from destructive behaviours that can ultimately leave you feeling negative and will not create a positive state of mind.

So let’s encourage each other to practice positivity. To learn how to see the light in any dark scenario that the world can throw at us because ultimately, shit happens. So if we can practise positive thinking in that moment, we will be armed with the best possible tools for getting through it in a more enlightened way that our mind, body and spirit will be happy with long term 😀

Happy Sunday Peeps!
Today has been what I would call, Sunday Funday With A Side Of Chill. My son had a birthday party to go to in the morning and luckily we could walk to the party through the beautiful Kedron Brook 🌳🌷🌞so we had a bit of an adventure walking along the water and the creeks and then spent the morning until midday at the party with lots of playing, lollies and giggles. It was refreshing for me to meet other mums and more of my son’s friends. 💝🍭🍰🍓
On the way home, my son happily walked along eating his lollies and just as we both started to feel worn out we arrived home and then spent most of the day lying about watching movies. I don’t usually feel lethargic and sleepy during the day, but today I was so exhausted I could have napped if I allowed myself to. This never happens (my partner can attest to this) I always have too much energy and too much going on in my head to settle haha.
It’s now 5:30 pm, my man is cooking dinner and my boy is chilling out, so now it’s hustle time I have 2 more illustrations to do for my food week and then tomorrow I will start my new theme!

Time to write, time to illustrate 😊
I hope you guys had a wonderful Sunday,
Amy
Xx

To live a more positive and loving life, we need to check in with ourselves; our mind, body and spirit. We need to reconnect, become aware of ourselves and make sure that we are giving ourselves the right things and treating ourselves the right way.

What I want to write about today is about checking in with ourselves and stopping that negative self-talk that can pop up from time to time. We all have those voices in our head that keep us up at night or create anxiety about events that haven’t even happened yet. It can make us feel down, doubtful and angry.

I’m not an expert in this field, but I do have tools that I have used in the past to help me keep a more peaceful self-talk and battle that negative mind chatter that comes with having anxiety.

Here are my tips:

VISUALIZE IT

If you’re a very visual person like I am, this might help you. I picture my negative self-talk scrawled on a piece of paper. When I see it I scrunch it up into a ball and throw in a tiny bin in the corner. It may sound silly but it helps. It will help you see that the negative talk is something that is insignificant and not needed and that you are stronger than it and are in control of it.

ASK YOURSELF, WOULD YOU SAY THAT TO YOUR BEST FRIEND?

We are our best friends cheerleaders, we love them, support them and encourage them. When it comes to our own stuff, our self-talk can do the opposite. Things like “I’m an idiot, I always mess up” “I can’t do that” or “OMG I can’t do anything right” start to fly through the landscape of our mind like a blimp. Why do we do that to ourselves when we are the complete opposite for the people that we love? When you start seeing that in yourself, stop and ask yourself, is this something I would say to my best friend? A simple question can stop that flow of negative talk and give you a chance to regroup and rethink.

THE RUBBERBAND

My psychologist recommended this to me each time I noticed that negative self-talk come in. I would pull the band and let it snap my wrist as a way if snapping me back to the present and keeping me from being consumed by my negative mind chatter. You don’t have to use this if you don’t want to, obviously. But having something around that will help you get out of that pit and back to the present can be helpful.

ACKNOWLEDGE IT, AND TALK TO IT

This may sound crazy but hear me out. One thing that can help is seeing that it’s there and talking to it like it’s another person. This person needs to be calmed down and needs to be told to go away and that it’s not needed. This person isn’t a part of you, it isn’t who you are. Become the kind inner voice that you need and let it drown out the negative.

IMPERFECTIONS ARE A PART OF US

We need to stop holding ourselves to impossibly high standards. Perfectionism can be soul crushing, it can feel so heavy on our shoulders that even when we are progressing and improving, we can’t even see it because we are looking for that perfection. If you make a mistake, remind yourself that it’s a part of life and now you have gained more knowledge from having made that mistake. It’s okay to be imperfect and to make a mistake. Go easy on yourself and embrace your imperfections.

I hope you all have a wonderful Sunday and thank you for reading <3. If you enjoyed reading this and feel it speaks to you then please give it a like and share it around. If you have any tips you would like to share then please do so in the comments.